Lionel Asbo

by Martin Amis (Knopf)

This novel of England’s hustling non-working classes is one of Amis’s funniest—in a league with “Money” and “London Fields.” Amis, like his heroes Nabokov and Bellow, writes exuberant, ecstatic prose. His ear is precisely tuned, and his sentences—in narration and dialogue—are lethal. Our hero is a thug named Asbo (for Anti-Social Behaviour Order), a brilliant sociopath who delivers beatings for sport and feeds Tabasco to his pit bulls to make them extra-ornery in the morning. (Reader alert: Asbo delivers the most hilarious wedding speech in the history of English literature.) He sort of raises his nephew, an ambitious lad who happens to be sleeping with Grandmum. Mid-book, Asbo wins the lottery, a Dickensian turn of fortune that not only leads to some unforgettable comic opportunities but deepens matters as well. The jokes, the high-voltage sentences—all that energy—begin to drive an increasingly complicated machine. ♦

Sign up to get the best of The New Yorker delivered to your inbox every day